La favola nella narrativa di Paolo Volponi : una filigrana ideologica

The paper discusses the use of some elements of the fable as a literary genre in Pianeta Irritabile (1978), in those works in prose where animals are the main characters and published in newspapers and magazines between 1982 and 1984, and in Mosche del capitale (1989). By discussing Volponi’s use of utopia and fable as an attempt to represent and reveal the conflict between nature and civilization, the paper suggests an ideological trajectory connecting the impossible utopia of Corporale (1974) with the disenchantment of Mosche. Thus, the paper highlights the Author’s increasing distrust in the possibility of rising against capitalist societies

Pigeons

I guess it was a couple of instants after knowing that an airliner crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center, the North Tower, right after having received a phone call from a colleague based in Boston, area code 617. He had been awake for two hours already. He had thanked Caroline, hung up the phone, turned the radio on and he had started to get changed – thinking that it was absurd to envy those who were sitting on the boat and were passing in front of the Irish Hunger Memorial for 36 Dollars. It had been one of them: one of those had called Caroline to tell her what was going on. He said so: his name was Colin something. But how on earth could he have told her that he was excited about what was going on? After the phone call with Caroline Bloom, Michael Taro Yamasaky had received other calls, even Matthew O’Brian had called, a prison warden at Jackson State Prison, one with the balls, they would say, one who was not afraid to fill in surveillance reports in prison cells, alone, just with paper and pen

Unico protagonista è il potere: allegorie, personaggi e straniamento nelle Mosche del capitale di Paolo Volponi.

Le mosche del capitale coheres with a wide line of thought developed by Volponi and regarding the transformations of Italian society in the period of transition towards neocapitalism. From this perspective, the paper analyzes three fundamental aspects of the novel: the editing and the allegorical structure of the text in relation to the connection between allegory and utopia in Volponi’s narrative; the system of the characters with regard to the absence of a leading character (the protagonist is the power conceived as a language transfiguring reality) and with regard to the parallel between the author’s and the main character’s experiences; the critical and conflicting attitude of the forms (comic, grotesque, estranging) through which itself is represented